Ok first off it is a good movie, no doubt. Gregory Peck absolutely knocks it out of the park with his portrayal of Atticus, and the chemistry between him and Scout is some of the best fake parent child interaction seen on screen. Those are the good things.
The rest of the movie however is not all that great, the big moral point of the plot is pretty much duh though even if it was a big deal in 1962. The whole Boo Radley subplot ties in awkwardly with the racial prejudice angle, they are just too unlike.It is filmed in a very classic unflashy style, not a bad thing in itself but nothing special either.
A whole lot of people will cite this as their favorite movie of all time, but when I think on it the only thing that stands out to me is Peck’s performance.
Anyway, there weren’t many movies made prior to this that dealt with the social injustice of the American south during that era. The emotional juxtaposition felt by middle class whities when they saw this made them realize how hypocritical they were in their own lives, and how really prejudiced their own views had been.
It made some people realize that the colour of ones skin might not be a decent indicator of guilt after all.
See, I am more cynical. I think it makes people feel good about themselves, because they identify with Atticus, and feel scorn and contempt towards the other whites in the town–something made especially easy by how trashy everyone else was.
Now, the funny effect of this is that people change their own behavior to reflect their new view of themselves, but, IME, they rarely pass through a “Oh god, I suck” phase. They just seamlesses revise themselves.
My major complaint about To Kill A Mockingbird is the scene where all the black people stand for him as he leaves. To me, the significance of that scene is the message that somehow what these people really care about is whether or not some white guy at least tried, that in the face of hopeless, institutionalized injustice, righteous black anger could be soothed by the fact that one white guy disagreed enough with the white community to risk their mild disapproval. It’s appropriate that for Scout, what matters is what her Dad did, and that what her dad did made him a hero. But the idea that the Robinsons–who are losing everything because of nothing, who are discovering that they are helpless victims of a cold and arbitrary world–would find any solace at all in knowing that one white guy out of the whole town was willing to speak for them really bothers me. Then Tom Robinson gets shot and blamed for it (I told him we’d appeal!) just to wrap up the story line neatly and get Atticus off the hook.
The book is one of my all-time favorites, and it’s pretty rare for a movie to also be very good. There are always things that get lost or left out when a movie is made of a book, but they did a very good job of keeping the best parts intact. Many movies from the '30s - early '60s still hold up well.
It is one of the rare films that is told from the child’s point of view that shows the adult world accurately, but retains the true sense of childhood.
I thought the book was pretty meh honestly. The bits about Tom Robinson and the trial are utterly fantastic, but that’s just a subplot of the novel. The bulk of it is simply a tale of an intelligent tomboy who doesn’t want to conform to the ladylike standards forced upon her. In other words it’s basically every other children’s novel.
Now in fairness I’m sure To Kill a Mockingbird served as inspiration to that entire “sub-genre”, but by the time I read the novel I’d already read that exact story a dozen times over. Scout and her conflicts with her teachers and aunt? Utterly uninteresting. The interactions with Boo Radley? They don’t really fit with anything else in the novel and were quite predictable.
The book reads like someone took two children’s short stories and sandwiched them around a totally unrelated legal thriller.
Au contraire. One of the overriding themes of the book is peoples’ irrational fear reaction to that which is different - the kids to Boo Radley, the townspeople to Tom Robinson. To kill a mockingbird is a terrible thing (notwithstanding Zooey Deschanel’s issue in the movie Failure to Launch), because the bird does no harm only gives joy, like both Boo and like Tom Robinson (if only they were given a fair chance by the ones who feared them).
But without Radley, the legal thriller would conclude with Robert E Lee Ewell viciously coming after Scout and – nobody stepping in with lethal force for the win?
Change things up and it’d be the only thing we remembered about Atticus: he couldn’t get justice in court, and so he killed another mad dog what needed killin’. That’s not the story she wanted to tell: not that, and not one where a little kid gets her eyes gouged out with a rusty knife, and not one where a member of the now-riled-up black community decides that Yes He Deserved To Die And I Hope He Burns In Hell; the stories dovetail to show what other white Southerners quietly do when the chips are down.
Incredible book. Very good movie, well done adaptation for the time. It evoked the time and setting of the story, but the movie without the book would have been largely forgotten.
I think that the death of Tom Robinson was not handled well. That Atticus says that he does not understand why that Robinson tried to escape. I think that shot while escaping is normally a euphemism for killing a prisoner. I came across that situation in the book Chiefs. Harper Lee needed to tie up everything so Tom Robinson had to die. And Boo Radley was able to beat the rap as he was a white man with friends in high places. Anything else would complicate things and ruin the point Harper Lee wanted to make.
It is a very good movie. As with all movies you have to look at them in context with the movies of their time. Or don’t but you can’t enjoy them as much. Some of my favorite movies are John Ford westerns. But looked at out if context the acting is stilted and unrealistic. If you can’t watch movies in context all of them that are more than 10 years old will lose their appeal.
I had to read TKAM in high school. I didn’t like most assigned works. For example, I haven’t read Dickens since experiencing the horror of Great Expectations. For Steinbeck it was The Pearl. Ugh, what a nasty piece of crap. Shakespeare was so boring, but at least I finally got over my dislike, and realized I’d been taught it poorly. Now I do like Shakespeare.
And I knew I’d hate TKAM as well. But I was wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s one of my all time favorite books, somewhere in my top ten. And the same goes for the movie. It’s one of the few times I’ve liked a movie and a book equally. Boo Radley looked just as I’d pictured him in my head, and so did many other of the characters.
If you’ve never revisited Steinbeck, you really should - he had two speeds: tragic populist (The Pearl, Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony) and warm magical realist (Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, Travels with Charley). If you haven’t read Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row, they are both short, charming and true joys to read. Can’t recommend them enough.
As for TKaM - I kinda go with **Manda JO’s **take - but not in a cynical way. Meaning: I think it does make the readers identify with Atticus and look at the attitudes of the rascist whites in a condescending way - but at the time, and in general, it was part of pointing the way to thinking differently about race. The heavy-handed plot where the heroic white guy is a hero to the blacks even while one of their own is unjustly convicted does stand out a bit now.
Loved the book when I read it, was disappointed in the movie at first viewing because it excised so much from the book for obvious reasons.
I still think it would have made the film more powerful to have included scenes where Scout is shown attending church with Calpurnia. These days, it would have been filmed that way.
Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Travels with Charley are my three favorite Steinbeck books. I tried to read, The Pearl, but it was like torture porn. One good thing happens to the poor diver, and the rest of the book is filled with bad things and bad people happening to him. Steinbeck had something to say with that one, as he often does with his books, but he chose a sledgehammer to say it with.
Ah, just realized who I’m responding to here. I’m pretty sure I’ve replied to you about this in the past, but I wanted to back what you’re saying. The three you listed are wonderful, with the first two having a gentle, fairy-tale sense about them. Travels with Charlie is, of course, Steinbeck’s end-of-life travelogue that somewhat shares the gentle sense of the other books. He had great respect, affection and empathy for the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” of America.
The Grapes of Wrath was obviously great as well (at least the Pulitzer and Nobel people thought so), but the story is so ingrained into our culture that it’s impossible to read it without already knowing half of it. I suppose it’s like watching Citizen Kane now and wondering what all the fuss is about. By this point in time, all the really innovative things has been integrated into moviemaking in general.
We’d find out that the mom had been stupidly clinging to the self-entitled perquisites of Southern Belle-hood, resulting in her death (by being eaten by hogs)
Atticus is an adored icon of virtue in the eyes of Scout, but at best she’s an unreliable narrator, at worst a revisionist hagiograpger. In reality, Atticus is an ineffectual bumbler who loses all his cases. True, the town is shamed by their thwarted attemp at lynching, so Atticus is given all such cases in the future, assuring the same results with cleaner hands.
Dill grows up to become the pet homosexual of the rich, until he betrays them in the pages of Esquire. He dies of drink after endless litigation against Gore Vidal, and an unshakable yet unsupported conviction that he’d have outdone Paul Lynne on Hollywood Squares.
Boo Radley grows up and marries. Their firstborn is made to live in a tool shed, and forced to bury their second born while it’s still alive. He becomes a hateful widower after his son murders his mother after encountering her having sex with another man.